ব্যাপটিস্ট মিশন প্রেস, সার্কুলার রোড, কলকাতা, ১৮১৮
In 1800, William Carey established a Mission Press in Serampore for the initial purpose of publishing scripture translations. In 1817, W. H. Pearce, who had trained at The Clarendon Press, Oxford, came to Serampore and associated himself with William Ward, the Serampore printer and colleague of William Carey and Joshua Marshman. In 1818, the Baptist Mission Press opened in Calcutta, as Pearce sought to parallel Ward’s work in Serampore. After fifteen years of dual operation, the two presses joined together in a common purpose in 1837.
Between the work of the Serampore Press and the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta, the complete Bible was printed in Bengali, Oriya, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Chinese. In addition to Bible translations, a wide range of subjects including science, education, and literature appeared from these presses. They produced literature from some thirty languages of India, including Telugu from South India and Pushtu in Afghanistan, appeared in native fonts at these mission presses. In the early 1970s, the Baptist Missionary Society closed down the press and sold the land. The metal type created during the work of the Serampore Trio was melted down. Newspapers in the Indian languages first appeared from the Serampore Mission Press in 1818. Also in 1818, Carey and his colleagues began publication of the Friend of India, an English newspaper that continued until 1875. Eventually, Friend of India was incorporated in 1897 into Statesman and Friend of India, a contemporary daily newspaper in India. See
Baptist Mission Press was a letterpress printers. That means the process was still basically the same as that used by Gutenberg and Caxton. It requires great skill to take metal type, ink it, and transfer the image onto paper. A lot of type was set by hand compositors, working back to front, placing individual pieces of type, spacers and leading to fill out the meta a catalogue entitled ”
The date and photographer’s name of the above photo of the BMP building are not known. Many interesting pictorials of BMP can be seen online in the booklet, ‘The Carey Exhibition of Early Printing and Fine Printing at the National Library Calcutta‘ dated 195l.
